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Smaller tire faster acceleration?
Alright me & my friend have a debate. I have a 92 S10 4.3 4×4 it has stock steelies with stock size 235 75 15’s that is 28″ of diameter in total. I have just purchased 15″ alum rims & am wanting to put 225 60’s 27″ on the back & 205 65’s 26″ front . Now he says the gearing is set to the stock tire size & I dont argue that. I also say that much is not that big of a deal & the weight loss along with the alum rims will be a performance gain if only to a marginal degree.
I own a shop, and have drag raced for many years. You got to think of it this way; It’s like using a short wrench Vs a long wrench to turn a bolt. The same physics apply to the height of the tire & wheel. The taller the wheel, the more torque is applied, and the ratio means more top end speed, thus the shorter the wheel, means less torque, but more bottom end speed. Weight is everything, and this is why racers try to get the vehicle down to the least weight they can. Common sense will tell you that the less something weighs, the less energy/torque will be required to move the object. What you are proposing to do will not work! On a 4×4 you must have the exact same ratio on the front as you do the rear. What will happen is one set of wheels will try to turn the gear-set faster than the other, the result will be something breaking in one or the other due to bind. If you put a 26″ on the front, and a 27″ on the rear it will bind up, and break the four wheel drive unit in a very short distance. If the circumference of the front doen’t match the circumference of the rear, one set of wheels will take less distance than the other to cover X amount of ground, and the result will be one set of wheels binding, draging, or sliding while trying to run the same speed. The result won’t be pretty! If all the vehicle had to do was roll with no gears involved, then it wouldn’t make any difference. The ratio of the gears in the front are the same as the ratio of the gears in the rear, and they turn the same speed, but do anything that changes this as in adding a different size tire to the front, and not the rear, the result is bind in the gears. Refer to any tire store, and they will tell you the same thing on a 4×4 vehicle.
Glad to help out, Good luck!!!
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